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    Fascism, Donald Trump and George Orwell | Letters

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    Emma Brockes points out that the word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot (The word ‘fascist’ has lost all meaning. And Trump is using that to his advantage, 23 October). It was the same in George Orwell’s day. In his 1944 Tribune column he said that, “as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless … I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.” The best definition he could come up with was to suggest that “almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’”.Neil SmithSolihull, West Midlands Although Emma Brockes provides examples of the usage of the word “fascist” to mean anyone in opposition to liberal elites, she should really have strictly defined it, and possibly pleaded that it has been so misused that the meaning has become obscured. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1964) defines it as, “the principles and organization of the patriotic and anti-communist movement in Italy started during the 1914-18 war, culminating in the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini”. Thus of historic origin. Obviously, the word originates in the Latin fasces meaning a bundle; in ancient Rome a bundle of sticks enclosing an axe was a sign of law and power. Chambers Dictionary (2011) adds that it is militaristic, “characterised by restrictions on individual freedom”. It has become a loose insult to anyone who speaks out against the liberal left, or holds views that challenge or differ from the prevailing political ideology. Similar sloppy usage applies to “far right” and “far left” as well. Journalists should be advocates for precision in language in these somewhat combustible times.Dr Jane DonatiHarpenden, Hertfordshire More

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      Stop using the term ‘centrist’. It doesn’t mean what you think it does | Arwa Mahdawi

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      I would like to start a petition for journalists – and everyone else – to immediately stop using the C-word. Centrist. It’s an insidious word that has degraded how we think about politics and distorted how we see the world.Perhaps that statement sounds a little over the top. After all, being a “centrist” sounds eminently reasonable, doesn’t it? A centrist is a moderate, right? Someone who is rational and practical and takes the middle ground. Someone who isn’t extreme like those crazy ideologues on the far right or far left. A centrist, logic dictates, is really what everyone should strive to be.But stop for a moment and ask yourself how you would define a centrist in more specific terms. When you start spelling out what the word really means, it becomes clear that it obfuscates more than it illuminates. The word does not describe a set of ideas so much as it reinforces a system of power.This, of course, is a feature not a bug of political language. As George Orwell wrote in his famous essay Politics and the English Language: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”Orwell wrote that essay in 1946. Today, 78 years later, it feels just as relevant. Look, for example, at the carnage in Gaza and the West Bank. Look at the statements from Israeli leaders that clearly suggest genocidal intent. Look at the tragedies that barely make a dent in the public consciousness any more. This week, for example, an Israeli airstrike killed four-day-old twins, along with their mother and grandmother, when their father went to collect birth certificates in central Gaza. Look at the levels of brutality that barely seem to register any more: there is video evidence of the sexual abuse of Palestinians at a notorious Israeli military prison (though the more accurate term is “torture camp”) and, even with that evidence, we know there will be no real accountability.Look at the dead. Nearly 40,000 people in Gaza are now dead, including nearly 15,000 children. When you look at the scale of devastation, it seems likely that those figures are an underestimate. Further, counting the dead is excruciatingly difficult: kids are being blown into fragments so small that their surviving relatives have to collect pieces of them in plastic bags. Then there are the tens and thousands more who are now dying from starvation, or facing a looming polio epidemic.Look at the West Bank, meanwhile, where Israel has published plans for new settlements, which violate international law. Since 7 October, the Israeli army and settlers have displaced 1,285 Palestinians and destroyed 641 structures in the West Bank, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Ethnic cleansing is taking place before our eyes.Now look at how all of this is being justified. This war isn’t just being waged with bombs, it’s being waged with “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”. When you lay out what is happening in clear language, it is indefensible. So political language dresses all those dead and starving children up in euphemism. It obscures ethnic cleansing with vagaries. Don’t believe your eyes, political writing says. What you are seeing is far more complex than your eyes can possibly comprehend.This narrative is so entrenched that people don’t believe their eyes when it comes to Palestinians. Last October, the actor Jamie Lee Curtis posted a photo on Instagram showing terrified-looking children peering up at the sky. She captioned the post “terror from the skies” with an Israel flag emoji. When it was pointed out that the kids were Palestinian, she deleted the post. Her eyes may have told her that those innocent children were terrified; the narrative, however, was more complicated.Around the same time, Justin Bieber posted a photo of bombed houses with the caption “praying for Israel”. When it was pointed out the picture was of Gaza, he deleted it and apparently stopped praying.In 2022, a picture of a small blonde confronting a soldier was widely shared online, with the claim that it was a Ukrainian girl standing up to a Russian soldier. How brave, people though. How inspiring! When it was revealed that it was actually old footage of a then 10-year-old Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian activist, interest in the image fizzled out.Again: when you lay out what is happening in clear language it is indefensible. When people see what is happening with their own eyes, it is indefensible. I say that as someone who has seen what life is like for Palestinians with my own eyes. As someone who had to run from soldiers shooting teargas when I visited my dad’s village in the West Bank when I had just turned six. Who was interrogated by an IDF soldier when I visited my dad’s village at 15, because I had a school chemistry book in my bag. Who knows what is like to be harassed and humiliated by heavily armed soldiers at checkpoints when you are just trying to go from one village to another. If you experience life under occupation for even a day it becomes starkly apparent that there is no way to defend it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn order to defend the indefensible, politicians and political writers move away from concreteness, from clear language, and hide behind the respectableness of terms like “centrism”. Pro-Palestinian protesters are labelled the far-left or extremists. Continuing to unconditionally send arms to Israel and shield the country’s far-right government from accountability, however, is considered a centrist – and therefore reasonable – position.See, for example, this paragraph from the New York Times, earlier this month, when Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, was still being considered as a possible candidate for Kamala Harris’s running mate.“Mr Shapiro has emerged as the choice of the party’s pro-Israel donors, those with ties to the school-choice movement and business-friendly contributors in Silicon Valley. But his centrist positions that appeal to those groups are the same ones that make him the least favorite of the party’s most liberal funders.”This paragraph is one of the rare instances where there is some explanation as to what centrism actually means. Centrism we are told, is being pro-Israel and pro-business, no matter what. This piece came out while Shapiro was facing criticism from the left for an old essay he wrote in which he called Palestinians too “battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own”. He has never properly apologized for this, nor will he ever have to, because being racist against Palestinians is a centrist position.As Orwell wrote, atrocities can be defended, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties”. If the Democratic party were to be honest about why it is doing very little to stop the carnage in Gaza and the settlements in the West Bank, the bluntest argument would be along the lines of: “Israel is an important tool in maintaining US imperialism and western interests. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is expedient to those interests. Human rights law doesn’t apply to the west.” Of course, being pro-ethnic cleansing doesn’t quite square with the do-gooding branding of the Democratic party. Instead, we are bombarded with the idea that massacring children is somehow a centrist and moderate position.“If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy,” Orwell wrote. There is very little that most of us can do to change what is happening in Gaza, but the one thing we can all do is simplify our English. So let’s begin with “centrism”. If we are to be honest about what we mean, if we are to express it in its simplest terms, we should use the word “status-quoism” instead. The point of words like “centrism” is to prevent thought and prompt acquiescence. It’s up to you whether you want to acquiesce.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      The Guardian view on an America First Caucus: a warning democracy is under siege | Editorial

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      In 1944, George Orwell felt that the word fascism had “lost the last vestige of meaning” so liberally had it been used. But fascism remains very much alive. Decades after Orwell’s message, one of the challenges today is to identify and name it. Whether the label could be applied to Donald Trump had divided expert opinion, until the 6 January assault on Capitol Hill by a mob whose passions had been inflamed by his speech earlier that day. This melted the resistance historians of fascism like Columbia University’s Robert Paxton felt to using the f-word. The use of violence against democratic institutions, he wrote, “crosses a red line”.If anyone wondered what American fascism might look like then they could start with the proposed congressional “America First Caucus”, which emerged this weekend from the office of extremist Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. Carrying the torch for Trumpism, this fringe agenda conceals its racial argument behind muscular populist ones. The caucus plans were welcomed by legislators who had fanned the flames of the Capitol riot. Before being elected to Congress, Ms Greene peddled conspiracy theories, made racist statements and indicated support for the execution of Democratic leaders and FBI agents. She renounced those beliefs on the eve of being kicked off congressional committees but made no apology for having held them.The proposed caucus platform contained not so much dog whistles as foghorns for white supremacy. America, the document claims, is based on “respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and decries “post-1965 immigrants” for depressing workers’ wages, highlighting the year when the US ended its policy of giving preferential treatment to western European migrants. It calls for rebuilding the US with an “aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture”. Thankfully the plan exploded on the launch pad. Republican leaders calculated it would hurt their electoral chances in moderate swing seats. Ms Greene disowned the caucus proposals.Fascism not only pursues rightwing policies, it seeks to build up mass-mobilising movements and paramilitary organisations with the aim of establishing a single-party dictatorship. Mr Trump saw armed citizens as a political asset. His heirs see despotism as a viable alternative to the current political structure. In Congress 147 Republican lawmakers promoted Mr Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Republicans in 47 states have 361 proposed laws to restrict voting access on grounds of baseless claims of electoral fraud.Around the world electorates will have to become reacquainted with fascism. Voters must attune themselves to what it looks and sounds like. In the UK, Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer was caught out earlier this year on a national radio phone-in when he failed to recognise a conspiracy theory popular with fascists, and Fox News star Tucker Carlson, known as the “great replacement”. It falsely claims that dwindling white birthrates have been orchestrated by multicultural global elites in an attempt to make whites a minority. There’s no suggestion that Sir Keir agreed with the racist caller but there was criticism in the way he handled the call. There is an urgent and pressing need to recognise both the real threat of fascism as well as the rhetorical and emotional motifs it employs. More

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      Can American democracy survive Donald Trump?

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      “I WON THE ELECTION!” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020, 10 days after he lost the election. At the same time, Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama, in which he warns that the US is “entering into an epistemological crisis” – a crisis of knowing. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” Obama explains, “by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” I saw the two assertions juxtaposed on Twitter as I was finishing writing this essay, and together they demonstrate its proposition: that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust, but in knowledge itself, largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality, as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies, disinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.
      The problem is exemplified by Trump’s utterance, which bears only the most tenuous relation to reality: Trump participated in an election, giving his declaration some contextual force, but he had not won the election, rendering the claim farcical to those who reject it. The capital letters make it even funnier, a failed tyrant trying to exert mastery through typography. But it stops being funny when we acknowledge that millions of people accept this lie as a decree. Their sheer volume creates a crisis in knowing, because truth-claims largely depend on consensual agreement. This is why the debates about the US’s alarming political situation have orbited so magnetically around language itself. For months, American political and historical commentators have disputed whether the Trump administration can be properly called “fascist”, whether in refusing to concede he is trying to effect a “coup”. Are these the right words to use to describe reality? Not knowing reflects a crisis of knowledge, which derives in part from a crisis in authority.
      However, the very fact that we need to ask this question helps answer it – for lying, paranoia and conspiracy are also defining features of the totalitarian societies that American society is being so hotly compared to. As Federico Finchelstein maintained in his recent A Brief History of Fascist Lies: “As facts are presented as ‘fake news’ and ideas originating among those who deny the facts become government policy, we must remember that current talk about ‘post-truth’ has a political and intellectual lineage: the history of fascist lying.” Both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, two of history’s most acute observers of totalitarianism, situated lying squarely at the heart of the totalitarian project. Not just the Hitlerian big lie of propaganda, but a culture of pervasive lying, what Arendt called “lying as a way of life” and “lying on principle”, systematic dishonesty that destroys the collective space of historical-factual reality. Orwell similarly insisted that lying is “integral to totalitarianism”: indeed, for Orwell, totalitarianism probably “demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth”. And as Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, both the Nazis and the Soviets created markedly paranoid societies, in which the capillary action of conspiratorial fictions did as much work as ideological infrastructure. More